Today in History

Today is Thursday, July 11, the 192nd day of 2013. There are 173 days left in the year.

Today’s highlight:

On July 11, 1533, Pope Clement VII issued a bull of excommunication against England’s King Henry VIII for the annulment of the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and subsequent marriage to second wife Anne Boleyn.

On this date:

In 1767, John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, was born in Braintree, Mass.

In 1798, the U.S. Marine Corps was formally re-established by a congressional act that also created the U.S. Marine Band.

In 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr mortally wounded former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton during a pistol duel in Weehawken, N.J.

In 1859, Big Ben, the great bell inside the famous London clock tower, chimed for the first time.

In 1922, the Hollywood Bowl officially opened with a program called “Symphonies Under the Stars” with Alfred Hertz conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

In 1937, American composer and pianist George Gershwin died at a Los Angeles hospital of a brain tumor; he was 38.

In 1952, the Republican national convention, meeting in Chicago, nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower for president and Richard M. Nixon for vice president.

In 1960, the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee was first published by J.B. Lippincott and Co.

In 1973, a Varig 707 from Brazil made an emergency crash-landing outside Paris after fire broke out on board, sending smoke into the cabin; 123 of the 134 people on board perished.

In 1979, the abandoned U.S. space station Skylab made a spectacular return to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere and showering debris over the Indian Ocean and Australia.

In 1988, nine people were killed when suspected Palestinian gunmen attacked hundreds of tourists aboard a Greek cruise ship, the City of Poros, which was steaming toward a marina in suburban Athens.

In 1995, the U.N.-designated “safe haven” of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina fell to Bosnian Serb forces, who then carried out the killings of 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

Ten years ago: President George W. Bush put responsibility squarely on the CIA for his disputed claim that Iraq had tried to acquire nuclear material from Africa, prompting Director George Tenet to publicly accept full blame for the miscue. The World Trade Organization ruled that heavy duties on steel imports imposed by the United States violated global trade rules. Thousands marked the anniversary of the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica in Bosnia, burying 282 newly identified victims.

Five years ago: Oil prices reached a record high of $147.27 a barrel. IndyMac Bank’s assets were seized by federal regulators. A North Korean soldier fatally shot a South Korean tourist at a northern mountain resort, further straining relations between the two Koreas. Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, the cardiovascular surgeon who pioneered such procedures as bypass surgery, died in Houston, Texas, at age 99.

One year ago: Unflinching before a skeptical NAACP crowd in Houston, Republican Mitt Romney declared he’d do more for African-Americans than Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Laos in more than five decades. The Syrian ambassador to Iraq defected, denouncing President Bashar Assad in a TV statement. Cookbook author Marion Cunningham, 90, died in Walnut Creek, Calif. Donald J. Sobol, 87, author of the popular “Encyclopedia Brown” series of children’s mysteries, died in Miami.